Death Will Get You Sober: A New York Mystery; Bruce Kohler #1 (Bruce Kohler Series) (19 page)

“I care!”

“No you don’t, you’re just humoring the children. It’s okay.”

“Are we through?” I asked plaintively.

Barbara looked at her notes. “The other sister.”

“She’s in Ohio. How are we going to do anything about her?”

“Frequent flyer miles.” Barbara looked pleased with herself. “Those conferences I went to last year? The time I went to Hawaii when you wouldn’t go?”

“You’re going to Ohio?” Jimmy sounded shocked.

Barbara started laughing. “You sound like one of those old Nero Wolfe mysteries where the detective never leaves his brownstone. ‘Out? Out the door and down the stoop?’ Yes, Jimmy, I’m going out the door, down the stoop, or rather, down in the elevator since we don’t have a stoop, into a taxi, onto a plane, and to Ohio.”

“Where in Ohio?” I asked.

“One of those ‘C’ cities,” Barbara said. “Jimmy looked it up. Cincinnati? Columbus? Cleveland?”

“Dayton,” said Jimmy.

“Right. That’s what I meant. Frances’s husband teaches history at the university. I can stay over near the airport, look the sister up the next morning, and come back that afternoon.”

“Ohio.” Jimmy shuddered. City boys, both of us.

“She might know something that would help,” Barbara said. “I have a feeling about it.”

“That line,” said Jimmy, “is supposed to be ‘I have a
bad
feeling about it.’”

The best laid plans, as the poet said, can get fucked up. Barbara’s burning desire to visit Ohio got scotched when her boss, Dr. Arnold, announced an imminent audit that meant the whole staff needed to work overtime for the next few days.

“It’s a surprise visit,” Barbara told us. “Very big deal, the charts all have to be perfect.”

“If it’s a surprise, how come you know about it?”

“Someone at the State tipped Dr. Arnold off. They always do.”

“Silly me!” I whacked the side of my head with my open palm. “Why did I even ask? It’s so logical!” I raised one eyebrow like Spock on the original
Star Trek
and spread my fingers, two on a side, in the Vulcan peace sign.

“You’ll have to go to Ohio, Bruce,” she said.

That stopped my clowning.

“Who, me?”

Barbara made a big show of looking all around their living room. I seemed to be spending as much time in their apartment as the gang on
Seinfeld
did at Jerry’s.

“I don’t see any other unemployed people here, do you?”

“Jimmy’s schedule is just as flexible as mine,” I protested.

“I assessed the relative difficulty,” Barbara said, “of getting Jimmy out from behind his computer versus getting you onto a plane, and guess who won.”

“She got that right, dude,” said Jimmy, tilting his chair way back and sounding smug.

“Oh, go hit your head on the radiator,” I said.

“Be glad it’s not Cincinnati, son,” Jimmy said cheerfully. “The airport there is in Kentucky.” Knowing history means he knows geography. Have I mentioned what a pain in the ass he can be?

“Ohio yes, Kentucky no,” I said. When the words were out, I realized I’d just capitulated.

Jimmy grinned. So did Barbara. But then her face fell.

“What about the frequent flyer miles? I can’t transfer them to Bruce.”

“No problem,” Jimmy said. “My treat.”

Growing up in Yorkville, Jimmy, like me, had never had a dime. But that changed when he discovered computers and how willingly they opened up for him. As soon as he had money, Jimmy became the world’s most generous guy. Usually I admired that quality in him. This time, I was screwed.

There are over two hundred flights a day from New York to Dayton. Air travel being what it is in our cockamamie times, all the nonstops were booked. In the end, I had to change planes in Detroit. I wanted to visit Detroit even less than I wanted to go to Dayton. I reminded myself never to go anywhere near Ohio again. Or Michigan.

We flew into a pretty good sunset. When we got above the clouds, it flattened out to a single line of blazing red gold rimming an endless bowl of blue. I spent the whole trip looking at it. Good thing I had the window seat and the middle seat was empty. The businessman on the aisle spent the whole trip drinking bourbon. My only diversion was half a can of Coke in a plastic glass and a microscopic bag of salted peanuts.

Night fell quickly as I made my way through the unfamiliar airport. I hopped on a bus to the nearest low end chain motel. Jimmy had suggested I call AA World Service and get contact numbers for the Dayton meetings. But I declined. I was still not so sure the New Yorkers in our own meetings were my brothers and sisters the way they thought they were. Instead, I went out for the native cuisine: an overcooked burger and greasy fries. In spite of all those amber waves of grain, Midwesterners didn’t have much time for vegetables. Maybe we were kindred spirits after all.

In the morning, since I was still in the heartland, I had a heart attack breakfast: fried eggs with bacon and sausage, toasted bagel dripping with butter. I regretted nothing but the bagel, an imposter that any New Yorker would have seen right through. Then I went in search of a map.

Frances Standish and her husband lived near the university. The bus I took let me off in a neighborhood that gave me the willies. I don’t actually see water every day. But water surrounds Manhattan in all directions, and its absence gave me claustrophobia. This Dayton, Ohio didn’t have any water at all that I could see. Just row after row of houses and lawns and trees and stretches of sidewalk. Call it a cross between a cornfield without the corn and a Monopoly board. Landlocked.

Looking for Frances Standish’s address, I got to see a lot of lawns and big trees marching down the streets. I mean we all marched: me and the lawns and trees and Monopoly houses. It probably was pretty in the summer. Fresh snow might have improved it too, on the ground and on the bare branches of the elms or whatever the big trees were. But there had obviously been a thaw and then a freeze. The lawns were dry and brown, the crossings a repository of frozen slush. We do frozen slush in New York too. I should have felt right at home. It was cold. I could see my breath. Each time a gust of wind hit, the chill made my eyes water. The ground was frozen solid. When I stepped on a lawn, it crunched.

I finally found the house, a two-story white frame affair with the kind of front porch that’s made for rocking chairs. If the Standishes had any, they had taken them inside for the winter. There was a two-car garage and one car, a biggish sedan in a discreet dark blue, in the driveway. Good. Someone was home. I hoped that it was Frances. God grant me the serenity to get this over with. I mounted the porch steps, took a deep breath, and rang the bell.

After a nerve-wracking wait, a woman who had to be Frances opened the door. She looked at me inquiringly. She was tall, like her sisters, but with an entirely different face. She wore a tweed jacket, gray wool slacks, and a silky pink turtleneck, with a strand of pearls around her neck. Nice shoes.

“Mrs. Standish?” Well trained by Barbara, I usually said “Ms.,” but west of the Hudson, the “Mrs.” just slipped out. I talked fast. I needed to persuade her I was not the Fuller Brush man before she slammed the door on me. “My name is Bruce Kohler. I was a friend of your brother Godfrey. I happened to be in town. I had some business at the university, and I thought I’d take the chance of coming by to say how sorry I am.”

I shivered involuntarily. It was cold on the porch. If Barbara had come, the woman would surely have invited her in. I wasn’t sure she’d trust a strange man that far. I produced what I hoped did not come across as a shit-eating grin and tried to look trustworthy. I’d better add some corroborating detail.

“I know he’d been through some hard times. But I saw him just before he died, and he sincerely meant to turn his life around. I was close enough to know.” Right there in the next bed, lady.

“I suppose you’d better come in,” she said without a flicker of a smile. She turned and led the way into the living room. The furniture looked well worn and very sturdy, as if meant to be passed down to the next generation. A faded, probably authentic Persian carpet covered most of the floor.

She nodded toward a chair. I perched on the edge of it. Now I had to get her to talk. Barbara would have known how to pour a never-ending stream of words into her silence. I couldn’t do that. We’d worked out an outline of what I should say.

“I know he’d had some trouble with his family in the past. So I thought you might be interested to hear that he got help. We’re planning an informal memorial gathering in New York.” I’d rehearsed that lie on the plane. “We hoped you’d be willing to share some kind of positive memory. I don’t mean to intrude. But some small anecdote? Maybe when he was younger?”

Her continued silence was unnerving.

“Mrs. Standish,” I said, “I lost a brother once myself.” That lie wasn’t in the script. It just tumbled out. “I found I had all sorts of mixed feelings that made me very uncomfortable and didn’t start to go away until I’d talked about them with someone.” That felt more phony than claiming the nonexistent brother, considering I’d never been in therapy. But Barbara would have been proud of me. In New York, if I’d mentioned therapy, maybe eight people out of ten would have rolled the welcome mat right out. But this was not New York. “And I knew Godfrey.”

“I doubt it,” she said bitterly.

She hesitated, but maybe Barbara was right. Everybody needs to talk to someone some time. I might be this uptight woman’s only opportunity.

“You say he was getting help. I believe that there is no way to help a person with that particular problem short of locking him up or warning everyone who has to deal with him. No amount of talking is going to change it, no matter what they say. In the Middle Ages, lepers had to ring a bell so people would know to get out of their way.”

Another codependent, I thought. I was catching Barbara’s habit of seeing them everywhere. Her husband taught history, and she scraped crumbs off his crisp conversation and added them to hers for flavor.

“I don’t know what they did with my brother’s kind then,” she said, “but what we did was to keep the children far away from him.”

Whoa, wait a minute. That kind? We alkies aren’t that bad, lady. What the hell was she talking about?

“You want to know something my brother did that wasn’t evil?” Rhetorical question. “He saved my nephew Brandy from drowning when he was eleven. But do you want to know why Brandy was in danger of drowning?” Definitely rhetorical. “He fell off the pier backing away from my brother, who wanted something unspeakable. Luckily it was enough of a shock that Brandy admitted to us what had been going on. We didn’t let the younger children near him after that. My sons were grown; they made their own choices. But if my sister let her younger boy and girl be in the same room with him after what happened, she’s a fool.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. She didn’t bother answering that.

“You say you were his friend. What kind of a person are you to have that kind of monster for a friend?” She regarded me with contempt.

“I didn’t know.”

I had no trouble looking and sounding horrified. She had just told me my friend had been a child molester. A pedophile. A monster. Barbara had described Emmie’s son Brandy as looking frail and otherworldly. I suddenly remembered that God had called for brandy in his delirium. Brandy, short for Brandon. I guessed Brandy was now old enough not to be of interest. I’d heard they usually fixate on kids of a certain age and go on to someone else when the kid outgrows their fantasy. It felt weird even to think about it. Complete disconnect between “they” and the buddy I knew. And what about the younger ones? Would he have approached the girl, or just the other little boy? Duncan, the ballet dancer. He was only eight.

Frances regarded me impatiently. “How could you know? They never look like monsters.”

“Did the parents know?” I blurted. Barbara would have a fit. I was God’s friend, but she was Emmie’s. Emmie! Would she turn out to be one of those women who cultivate denial and let the abuse go on? She hadn’t stopped sneaking her brother into the house. She fed him Earl Grey and scones the day before he died. But she knew he shouldn’t be alone with the kids. She stopped it, but too late. And what about Sam Weill? He had to know. He had made a rule not to let God near the children. He had not condoned it once he knew.

“Of course they did.” Frances’s thin voice dripped contempt, whether for me or for Sam and Emmie, I couldn’t tell. Probably all of us.

“I just knew about the problem with alcohol and drugs. He really did get clean and sober right before he died.”

“Do you believe in evil, Mr. Kohler?”

She remembered my name. She probably never forgot or forgave anything.

“That’s a hard question,” I temporized. I wished someone could have beamed me up back to New York. Immediately. I had the information I’d come to Ohio for. Beyond my wildest dreams. And I’d had enough. “Some people think it’s an illness. But no one could excuse or condone it. And of course the most important thing is to protect the children.” I hoped she couldn’t take exception to that. I apologized profusely and got the hell out of there.

*

Back in New York, Barbara was just as upset as I knew she’d be.

“How could she? How could she!” She meant Emmie.

“How could God?” I said. “I’d have sworn he was a good guy. I didn’t have a clue. He shut down when I tried to talk about the family. But I thought that just meant the break with them was painful. We all have people we’re ashamed to face or think about.”

I intercepted a meaningful look between Jimmy and Barbara. They knew they were on my amends list, all right. But this thing made me feel like a saint in comparison. My worst day drinking, I’d never harmed a child.

“I don’t get,” Barbara said, “why God’s chart didn’t have a hint of this.”

“You think he’d have told them
that
? No way!”

“You’d be surprised,” she said. “You know, the State requires us now to ask all those sexual abuse questions right away.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Jimmy said.